Dr. Robert Marbut recently came to town and gave a talk on the state of local homelessness to a targeted audience of unenthusiastic listeners.

Marbut’s been studying causes and cures in homeless populations for a quarter century and he knows what works, what doesn’t and how to get things done. He had come to explain the mess we are in and offer tangible, workable solutions.

But the Ukiah crowd was made up, mostly, of the people who had created the mess and for decades have been profiting from the mess, and they were having none of this nonsense about cleaning it up. Make things more efficient and more effective? Save money? Ha. Saving money is the last thing on the list for professional do-gooders.

Instead, well over 100 of them had turned out to offer solid support for the status quo and to defend it against all enemies. On this night there was only one enemy, Robert Marbut, but he had the advantage of knowing what he was talking about.

So the 100-to-one odds looked pretty good to me.

The talk and the powerpoint show were hella. Mocking “solutions” to homelessness offered by partisans on the left and right, Marbut steered a pragmatic and positive course through the swampy mass of cherished beliefs that aren’t true, of lovely scenarios that can’t happen, and of the tough decisions that await us.

Dr. Marbut had met repeatedly with all the service providers, and he’d gone, also repeatedly, to homeless encampments. He spoke of the need to distinguish between folks who had grown up and gone to school in Mendocino County and now were homeless versus those who, to no one’s surprise, visit Ukiah “for the benefits and the weather.”

His point, and it was emphasized repeatedly, is that our town does not have the resources to provide benefits to each and every person who can locate Ukiah on a map and then find a way to get here. The line will be nine miles long and grow hourly.

This means, says Marbut, we have to make decisions on how to parcel out services. His studies show about 60 percent of those in need are from right here, and about 40 percent are from somewhere else. So, he said, we should spend the bulk of our money and resources on people we are most responsible for. That’s the locals.

It’s a reasonable suggestion worthy of thoughtful debate, but of course this is Mendocino County and the suggestion was met with a sneering jeer: “Build a wall!” came the shout. This was joined by derisive laughter and scattered applause from the roomful of therapists, program administrators and other intellectuals. These are the folks who make big money providing assistance to as many lost souls as they can possibly recruit to visit Ukiah for their tender ministrations.

Marbut, not stupid, was un-rattled by the stupid jeer. He’s bewildered at the overlapping layers of local programs offered, as he’d never seen such duplication of services in so small a town.

Example? We have five different locations offering showers for the homeless. That’s four too many, said Marbut. Over and over he stressed the need to place all programs in a single location and to marry them to recovery-related services.

Another surprise, he said, was that in other areas he’d studied, homeless people generally visit four or five different places a day. Our homeless population mostly frequents just two locations daily: the Ukiah Valley Medical Center and the library.

He also offered amusing off-the-cuff observations. He denied he knows more about local homeless than anyone else, saying “I’m not smarter just because I drove further to get here.”

He also suggested a better term for the condition might be “car-lessness” since an automobile is actually the last rung on the ladder down to a world of having nothing. First an individual becomes unemployed or loses a rent-sharing partner, then gets evicted from an apartment and winds up living in a car. Then the car disappears.

Marbut promised he would answer audience questions all night long and into tomorrow morning if need be, a promise he probably came to regret. Everyone from the Queen Bee of nonprofit bosses, Camille Schraeder, to a county librarian and other turf-guarding professionals took tedious turns at the microphone, often to read pre-written, self-serving statements about the unique worthiness of their particular agency and the certain devastation should it lose funding.

One chap who described himself as both homeless and a poet requested microphone time so he could sing a very long song about something. It helped clear the room from a meeting that was already in danger of running four hours.

That’s when I left. I don’t know how it all ended but I hope Dr. Marbut didn’t wind up buying breakfast for the singing homeless poet.

Tom Hine once lived in his vehicle for several weeks while trying to find a place to live in the town he was working, but never thought of himself as homeless until writing this column. TWK did not experience those unpleasantries, having not yet been dreamed up and enlisted as Hine’s nom de plume, a fancy French phrase for “Mister Plum.”